A review by silverliningsandpages
Distant Sunflower Fields by Li Juan

adventurous challenging emotional hopeful informative reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

Li Juan’s memoir chronicles her family’s painstaking efforts to grow a crop of sunflowers in the harsh rolling desert on china’s northwest frontier.  At the mercy of unforgiving drought, sandstorms, locusts and crop eating gazelles, they manage to eke out an existence.

The endurance, dignity and strength of Li Juan, her tenacious mother and ageing grandmother are very humbling.  As the author describes her spirited dogs’ antics, there is much humour and cheer in her conversational, colloquial narrative.  However, underlying, there appears to be a well of self-reproach, restlessness and wistfulness in her writing.  It is her lone walks and keen observations of the wild beauty in the surrounding land that seem to restore hope and anchor her to the earth.  The descriptions are beautifully evocative, and she candidly expresses her reverence for the power of nature and awareness of how humanity has inhabited and “plundered” the land.

My favourite section is the very insightful afterword, which pulls together the author’s motivations and thoughts on the processes of writing and documenting through pictures the hopes and dreams of a family.

“Writing is akin to thrusting a spade into the ground, and shifting the earth to see what’s there underneath; it’s an adventure of discovery.”

Thank you Sionoist Books for this review copy in exchange for an honest opinion.  I’m

really enjoying discovering new (to me) indie publishers and translated literature.